Older blog entries for mtearle (starting at number 38)

linux.conf.au - You heard it here first, Registrations To Linux.Conf.Au are now open. CFP is progressing well, we should know soon who the speakers that are coming are.

October - it's getting awfully close to my birthday, mental note - "must get life"

It's a wide open road - Watching "A Long Way To The Top", it amazing all the great Aussie music there is ... didn't realise half of it was.

I miss the Loft, it was a cultural and social refuge of a kind, a shared meme. Unfortunately it decided to stay behind in the nineties whilst the rest of us moved on. Will we find something to replace it?

OpenOffice - Burn a copy and give to a local small business. I don't think many end users have heard of it; if you can't get them running Linux at least get them using OpenOffice.

Back To The Future - Computer Emulators - Running an emulator for my first computer (VZ300) (Z80 based computer) on my laptop. Oh, the irony!

linux.conf.au - Paper review is starting, Registrations should be open soon

One year since graduation ... - Still have a job in Perth's catatonic IT job market

One year since ... - For The People -

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

One year since ... - The Rhetoric - Fortress America is here and it just doesn't understand. The number of anti-US letters (against US foreign policy) in this weeks paper has been telling and reassuring that the Australian public isn't blindly following King Bush.

blogging as bookmarking - interesting meme of the day

• Work
• Rest
• Play

libical - I think I've become the unoffical feeder/keeper of the python binding. Included in the credits file now, ESR was right on that ego thing to some extent *grin*

toyage - Got myself an Acer Travelmate 213TXV laptop, sufficiently funky little beast. If only the Linux support wasn't so anemic...

home - Living in North Perth now, life is good.

linux.conf.au - Our Call for Papers appears to have been sucessfull with enough to go ahead with a good conference. A flyer and poster are available for people to distribute. Registrations hopefully will be open soon ...

two degress of separation - Perth is only that big and by virtue of being on the same continent Sydney suffers the same fate. Got a phone call from Striker who had bumped into k who was mostly likely at hypatia's party, and not to forget jdub (LCA veteran) who should be coming to LCA 2003 ....

libical - Woot! My patches to the Python Storage API got accepted.

Graduation - Congratulations to mbp. As another person who took over eight years to get theirs it's worth sticking at it; and the world changes all so slightly after it ... (or wildly, I graduated Sept 10th)

linux.conf.au 2003 - Organisation continues full steam ahead; the backend for the registration is almost done; speakers are coming, are you? (and lots of other stuff I can't talk about just yet)

housemates - # times I've done the washing up: 1, # times police have come looking for me: 2, # times housemates have reached finals of karaoke at Gay Bar: 1, # of times I can't stop laughing: uncountable

LCA2002 & Debian mini-conf - Brisbane was lots of fun, scarily similar to Perth. Memorable presentations where Bdale's on porting to PA/RISC and ia64, Samba 3.0 by Jeremy and Andrew and Tinmith Augmented Reality by Wayne Piekarski

LCA2003 - Perth won the bid to host the 2003 incarnation of linux.conf.au, organisation continues apace. I've been roped into handle the finances and be a stunt James. Due to the vagaries of .conf.au administration, our website can currently be found at conf.linux.org.au

Work - Looks like I'll be doing much more stuff with MySource. If I'm good, I might get to do some calendaring stuff....

IV - Sang the Rachmaninoff Vespers at The Sydney Intervarsity Choral Festival 2002. Russian is fun to sing!

Australia is a small island - Random house guest (hi Striker) last Tuesday from Evil House (a supposed relation of the spankyhouse) who lives with part of a cool ska band named Halfdave who I saw just before IV....

life - continues to amuse, abuse and confuse

advodiary - Woohoo! XML-RPC goodness!

Another year over And a new one just begun - 2001 passed boggingly quickly, much more than I had anticipated. Happy New Year!

R is for Reverse Engineering - Currently reversing engineering the EPROM from the Snack Vending machine that the University Computer Club owns for hardware compatibility reasons and to get it on the Internet. Needing to brush up on my HC11 assembly.

X is for XML-RPC - Currently toying around with it for two projects - the first being a library system for the local SciFi club and the other being a calendaring/scheduling project that is still just a nascent thought. The perl RPC::XML module rocks and so does the test page at www.dscpl.com.au that I can debug my server with. XML-RPC seems to be one of those technologies that is going to quietly take over the world.

O is for Open Source - Wading into that discussion, Open Source is not dead for the same reasons that Cuba is still exists as a communist state, they both work for the people involved. (Cuba was one of the more successful communist states till the mid 90s, and yes, I'm making an ironic comparision to the gee pee ell)

L is for linux.conf.au Plane Tickets are in hand and conference rego is just about to be paid this week, it's going to be lots of fun again (and will probably do wonders for my enthusiasm)

W is for Work - Been playing with a cute Australian Content Management System called MySource and submitting patches back. It's rather featureful and useable unlike some of the other web projects I've seen.

B is for Backup - 'nuff said. The simple joy of hard drive failures.

Teachers - My two friends who are both teachers, Fi and Liz, seem to be the most affected by current events. It must be painful to encounter the ingnorance and hope of the schoolyard teaching our youth who have no perspective of what happened.

diaries - mbp and sethcohn both aptly summing up the past 24 hours as the dust settles. Another diary caught my eye with the mention of the word PEACE, it was certainly shattered on Tuesday and shocked the world. The world needs leadership toward it, currently peace is only a luxury to those who can afford it.

The United Nations seemingly is our last best hope for that currently but given that even affluent countries such as Australia, who are signatories on the Declaration of Human Rights, can afford to ignore it (with respect to recent asylum seekers) and countries such as the United States of America refusing to sign up to treatries on the use and prohibition of landmines for domestic political reasonings, where are the right thinking men of the world?

The Most Isolated Capital City In The World - Living in Perth provides an interesting and detached perspective on world events. Perth is closer to another country than to our nations capital. I was out having a few drinks with friends to celebrate my recent graduation at my local tavern when someone came in and implored us to turn the television on. My friends and the other people their just stood there in shock at the footage that was appearing on the screen. Some of us quite visibly shaken. A comparision I heard today is that this will be a defining moment for our generation akin to the assasination of JFK or the Munich Olympics and we'll ask each other where we were it happened.

What makes it even more touch home is that we know people via at most 1 or 2 degrees of separation that were in the Manhattan area when the collapse happened. It makes me extremely thankful for the quality of life that we have here and my thoughts go out to those more directly affected. Perth is so remote from anywhere useful apart from a submarine base that it makes it an unattractive target and that our tallest building (50+ stories) is rather than a monument to capitalism it more to its failures and excesses.

The media frenzy is reminiscent of the Gulf War but without the anticipation. I hope we don't see Fortress America come into existance, that would be a very sad thing.

life - I've just acquired three letters after my name B, C, & M. After eight and half years about bloody time! :)

websites - yakk - that's the scariest design yet!

ObHacking - Got the Wizard PC FM Radio working with my linux box, now to write some evil code to grab speed camera locations and feed that into sphinx...